Most scholars hold a skeptical view of the war elephant of ancient India. I show that the skepticism of present-day historians derives from ancient Rome, at the end of the Republic and the beginning of the Empire, when the Romans, having defeated the elephant-deploying powers of the Hellenistic period, ended the use of war elephants in its growing empire for all time. Late Roman war elephant skepticism was taken up by Quintus Curtius Rufus, who embraced it and strengthened it rhetorically in speeches he devised and put into Alexander’s mouth, in his history of Alexander. In this way Roman skepticism about the value of the Indian war elephant was attributed to Alexander, two centuries previous to its formation among the Romans. In modern times the late Roman view that elephants have a tendency to panic and become a greater danger to their own side was turned into a settled truth about elephant physiology, but it does not accord with the evidence offered.

Scholars have long recognized the importance of so-called “Ghent” systems of unemployment insurance for working-class strength and therefore national capitalist development. While only three European countries currently maintain “pure” Ghent systems, nearly a dozen did so during the first half of the last century. This article investigates the discontinuation of these systems in two paradigmatic cases, Belgium and the Netherlands. By focusing on the irreconcilable nature of trade union goals regarding the delivery, range, and funding of unemployment insurance, the analysis explains how the discontinuation of Ghent in these two countries could occur under distinctly union-friendly governments and with the explicit consent of their trade union movements. By showing that both the Belgian and Dutch trade union movements displayed great uncertainty regarding the organizational costs and benefits of assuming responsibility for benefit delivery, the article also explains why Belgium subsequently created a semi-Ghent system that continued to significantly boost union membership, while the Netherlands did not.

This article investigates geosocial patterns of marriage strategies among the leadership of Hasidism, arguably the most prominent socio-religious movement of modern Jewry, known for its unique network of charismatic leaders organized in hereditary dynasties. The article’s core premise is that grasping the network structure of the Hasidic movement’s dynasties, which has been under-researched, is crucial to understanding the movement’s social and cultural dynamics. The study employs social network analysis (SNA) and spatial analysis to examine marital unions among these leaders (2,375 cases), from the early stages of the movement in the eighteenth century until the early twenty-first century. The article explains, for the first time, how Hasidic dynasties expanded, eroded, and negotiated their status within the network of other dynasties. More specifically, we analyze the position of the dynasties within a wider context of social and spatial interconnection patterns, the significance of endogamy, the impact of territorial factors on marriage preferences, and the creation of dynastic clusters. A significant conclusion of this article is that, rather than a set of unrelated dynasties, Hasidic leadership gradually became a web of interconnected families with explicable patterns of organization. These findings can help explain historical processes in Hasidism, such as its persistence through historical crises. It can also illuminate leadership processes in other religions in which, as in Hasidism, the social structure of charismatic leadership is based on clans.

The concept of ritual has been all too loosely applied to violence and atrocity with assumptions of repetitiveness, mythic symbolism, and religious overtones. This paper examines a selection of modern cases of atrocity for specific ritual elements: attention to body and spaces as frames for meaning; a prescripted mode of action; and performative enaction of a new millennial or transgressive order. Focal cases include American lynching (nineteenth–twentieth centuries) and militia atrocities in Sierra Leone and Liberia (1990s), while examples of gendered atrocity in ritualized forms (perpetrated by Bosnian Serbs and the Islamic State) are broached in the conclusion. Ritualization is not typical to modern atrocities but allows perpetrating groups to experience meaningfulness in the violent acts they assemble, often in situations of crisis.

Forty years into Botswana’s AIDS epidemic, amidst persistently low rates of marriage across southern Africa, an unexpected uptick in weddings appears to be afoot. Young people orphaned in the worst years of the epidemic are crafting creative paths to marriage where—and perhaps because—their parents could not. Taking the lead of a pastor’s assertion that the wife is mother of her husband, I suggest these conjugal creativities turn on an understanding of marriage as an intergenerational relationship. Casting marriage in intergenerational terms is an act of ethical (re)imagination that creates experimental possibilities for reworking personhood, pasts, and futures in ways that respond closely to the specific crises and loss the AIDS epidemic brought to Botswana. This experimentation is highly unpredictable and may reproduce the crisis and loss to which it responds; the multivalences of marriage-as-motherhood can be sources of failure and violence, as well as innovation and life. But it also recuperates and reorients intergenerational relationships, retrospectively and prospectively, regenerating persons and relations, in time. While different crises might invite different sorts of ethical re-imagination, marriage gives us a novel perspective on how people live with, and through, times of crisis. And marriage emerges as a crucial if often overlooked practice by which social change is not only managed but sought and produced.